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Text 2 Many things make people think artists are weird. But the weirdest may be this: artists’ only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad. This wasn’t always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century onward, more artists began seeing happiness as meaningless, phony or, worst of all, boring, as we went from Wordsworth’s daffodils to Baudelaire’s flowers of evil. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modem times have seen so much misery. But it’s not as if earlier times didn’t know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today. After all, what is the one modem form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just all ideal but an ideology. People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in danger and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too. Today the messages the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and for ever happy Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda -- to lure us to open our wallets -- they make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks. But what we forget -- what our economy depends on us forgetting -- is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need art to tell us, as religion once did, Me mento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It’s a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air. By citing the examples of poets Wordsworth and Baudelaire, the author intends to show that ______.
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Text 1 Can the Internet help patients jump the line at the doctor’s office The Silicon Valley Employers Forum, a sophisticated group of technology companies, is launching a pilot program to test online "virtual visits" between doctors at three big local medical groups and about 6 000 employees and their families. The six employers taking part in the Silicon Valley initiative, including heavy hitters such as Oracle and Cisco Systems, hope that online visits will mean employees won’t have to skip work to tend to minor ailments or to follow up on chronic conditions. "With our long commutes and traffic, driving 40 miles to your doctor in your hometown can be a big chunk of time, "says Cindy Conway, benefits director at Cadence Design Systems, one of the participating companies. Doctors aren’t clamoring to chat with patients online for free; they spend enough unpaid time on the phone. Only 1 in 5 has ever e-mailed a patient, and just 9 percent are interested in doing so, according to the research firm Cyber Dialogue. "We are not stupid," says Stifling Somers, executive director of the Silicon Valley employers group. "Doctors getting paid is a critical piece in getting this to work." In the pilot program, physicians will get $20 per online consultation, about what they get for a simple office visit. Doctors also fear they’ll be swamped by rambling e-mails that tell everything but what’s needed to make a diagnosis. So the new program will use technology supplied by Healinx, an Alameda, Calif-based star-up. Healinx’s "Smart Symptom Wizard" questions patients and turns answers into a succinct message. The company has online dialogues for 60 common conditions. The doctor can then diagnose the problem and outline a treatment plan, which could include e-mailing a prescription or a face-to-face visit. Can e-mail replace the doctor’s office Many conditions, such as persistent cough, require a stethoscope to discover what’s wrong and to avoid a malpractice suit. Even Larry Bonham, head of one of the doctor’s groups in the pilot, believes the virtual doctor’s visits offer a "very narrow" sliver of service between phone calls to an advice nurse and a visit to the clinic. The pilot program, set to end in nine months, also hopes to determine whether online visits will boost worker productivity enough to offset the cost of the service. So far, the Internet’s record in the health field has been underwhelming. The experiment is "a huge roll of the dice for Healinx", notes Michael Barrett, an analyst at Internet consulting firm Forester Research. If the "Web visits" succeed, expect some HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations) to pay for online visits. If doctors, employers, and patients aren’t satisfied, figure on one more E health star-up to stand down. "Smart Symptom Wizard" is capable of ______.
Conversational Skills People who usually make us feel comfortable in conversations are good talkers. And they have something in common, i.e. skills to put people at ease. 1. Skill to ask questions 1) be aware of the human nature: readiness to answer others’ questions regardless of (1) 2) start a conversation with some personal but unharmful questions e.g. questions about one’s (2) questions about one’s activities in the (3) 3) be able to spot signals for further talk 2. Skill to (4) for answers 1) don’t shift from subject to subject -- sticking to the same subject: (5) in conversation 2) listen to (6) of voice -- If people sound unenthusiastic, then change subject. 3) use eyes and ears -- steady your gaze while listening 3. Skill to laugh Effects of laughter: -- (7) -- help start (8) 4. Skill to part 1) importance: open up possibilities for future friendship or contact 2) ways: -- men : a smile, a (9) -- women: same as (10) now -- how to express pleasure in meeting someone
Cooperative competition. Competitive cooperation. Confused Airline alliances have travellers scratching their heads over what’s going on in the skies. Some folks view alliances as a blessing to travellers, offering seamless travel, reduced fares and enhanced frequent-flyer benefits. Others see a conspiracy of big businesses, causing de- creased competition, increased fares and fewer choices. Whatever your opinion, there’s no escaping airline alliances: the marketing hype is unrelenting, with each of the two mega-groupings, One world and Star Alliance, promoting itself as the best choice for all travellers. And, even if you turn away from their ads, chances are they will figure in any of your travel plans. By the end of the year, One world and Star Alliance will between them control more than 40% of the traffic in the sky. Some pundits predict that figure will be more like 75% in 10 years. But why, after years of often ferocious competition, have airlines decided to band together Let’s just say the timing is mutually convenient. North American airlines, having exhausted all means of earning customer loyalty at home, have been looking for ways to reach out to foreign flyers. Asian carriers are still hurting from the region-wide economic downturn that began two years ago -- just when some of the airlines were taking delivery of new aircraft. Alliances also allow carriers to cut costs and increase profits by pooling manpower resources on the ground (rather than each airline maintaining its own ground crew) and code-sharing--the practice of two partners selling tickets and operating only one aircraft. So alliances are terrific for airlines--but are they good for the passenger Absolutely, say the airlines: think of the lounges, the joint FFP (frequent flyer programme) benefits, the round-the-world fares, and the global service networks. Then there’s the promise of "seamless" travel: the ability to, say, travel from Singapore to Rome to New York to Rio de Janiero, all on one ticket, without having to wait hours for connections or worry about your bags. Sounds utopian Peter Buecking, Cathay Pacific’s director of sales and marketing, thinks that seamless travel is still evolving. "It’s fair to say that these links are only in their infancy. The key to seamlessness rests in infrastructure and information sharing. We’re working on this." Henry Ma, spokesperson for Star Alliance in Hong Kong, lists some of the other benefits for consumers : "Global travellers have an easier time making connections and planning their itineraries. " Ma claims alliances also assure passengers consistent service standards. Critics of alliances say the much-touted benefits to the consumer are mostly pie in the sky, that alliances are all about reducing costs for the airlines, rationalizing services and running joint marketing programmes. Jeff Blyskal, associate editor of Consumer Reports magazine, says the promotional ballyhoo over alliances is much ado about nothing. "I don’t see much of a gain for consumers: alliances are just a marketing gimmick. And as far as seamless travel goes, I’ll believe it when I see it. Most airlines can’t even get their own connections under control, let alone coordinate with another airline. " Blyskal believes alliances will ultimately result in decreased flight choices and increased costs for consumers. Instead of two airlines competing and each operating a flight on the same route at 70% capacity, the allied pair will share the route and run one full flight. Since fewer seats will be available, passengers will be obliged to pay more for tickets. The truth about alliances and their merits probably lies somewhere between the travel utopia presented by the players and the evil empires portrayed by their critics. And how much they affect you depends on what kind of traveller you are. Those who’ve already made the elite grade in the FFP of a major airline stand to benefit the most when it joins an alliance: then they enjoy the FFP perks and advantages on any and all of the member carriers. For example, if you’re a Marco Polo Club "gold" member of Cathay Pacific’s Asia Miles FFP, you will automatically be treated as a valuable customer by all members of One world, of which Cathay Pacific is a member even if you’ve never flown with them before. For those who haven’t made the top grade in any FFP, alliances might be a way of simplifying the earning of frequent flyer miles. For example, I belong to United Airline’s Mile- age Plus and generally fly less than 25,000 miles a year. But 1 earn miles with every flight l take on Star Alliance member--All Nippon Airways and Thai Airways. If you fly less than I do, you might be smarter to stay out of the FFP game altogether. Hunt for bargains when booking flights and you might be able to save enough to take that extra trip anyway. The only real benefit infrequent flyers can draw from an alliance is an inexpensive round-the-world fare. The bottom line: for all the marketing hype, alliances aren’t all things to all people--but everybody can get some benefit out of them. According to the passage, which of the following categories of travellers will gain most from airline alliances
A team of international researchers has found new evidence that an endangered subspecies of chimpanzee is the source of the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in humans. Experts said the finding could lead to new treatments for AIDS and contribute to the development of a vaccine against the disease. The research team said the chimp -- a subspecies known as Pan troglodytes native to west central Africa carries a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that is closely related to three strains of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS. One of these strains, HIV-1, has caused the vast majority of the estimated 30 million HIV infections around the world. The researchers are uncertain when the chimp virus, called SIVcpz (for simian immunodeficiency virus chimpanzee), first infected humans, although the oldest documented case of HIV has been linked to a Bantu man who died in Central Africa in 1959. But they said the virus, which does not appear to harm the chimps, was most likely transmitted to humans when hunters were exposed to chimp blood while killing and butchering the animals for food. Once transmitted to humans, the researchers believe the virus mutated into HIV-1. Team leader Beatrice Hahn, an AIDS researcher at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, said the chimps have probably carried the virus for hundreds of thousands of years. Since humans have probably hunted the animals since prehistoric times, Hahn said the virus may have jumped to humans on many occasions, but was not transmitted widely among humans until the 20th century. Increased hunting of the chimpanzees, along with human migration to African cities and changing sexual mores, could help explain the recent epidemic, Hahn said. Scientists had long suspected that a nonhuman primate was the source of HIV-1. Earlier studies suggested that the sooty mangabey monkey, a native of West Africa, was the likely source of HIV-2 - a rarer form of the AIDS virus that is transmitted less easily than HIV-1. However, only a few samples of SIV strains exist, making it difficult for researchers to confidently connect the strains to HIV-1. As part of their effort to discover the source of HIV-1, the research team studied the four known samples of SIVcpz. They learned that three of the four samples came from chimps belonging to the subspecies P. t. troglodytes. The remaining sample came from another subspecies, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, which inhabits East Africa. The team then compared the SIVcpz strains to each other and found that all three of the viruses from P.t. troglodytes were closely related, while the virus from P. t. schweinfurthii was genetically different. Next they compared the SIVcpz strains to the main subgroups of HIV-1, known as M, N, and O. Their comparisons showed that the P.t. troglodytes viruses strongly resembled all three HIV-1 subgroups. Additional evidence that HIV-1 could be linked to P. t. troglodytes came when the researchers examined the chimps’ natural habitat. The researchers quickly discovered that the chimps live primarily in the West African nations of Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of the Congo, the geographic region where HIV-1 was first identified. Upon closer study, the researchers learned that the chimps were being killed in growing numbers for the so-called bushmeat trade, a trend assisted by the construction of new logging roads in once remote forests. The researchers said that continued hunting of the animals meant that many people are still likely to be exposed to SIVcpz, increasing the risk of additional cross-species transmissions. Many AIDS researchers welcomed the team’s finding, but said the new work had not proved the connection definitively. Most of the doubts centered on the difficulty of drawing conclusions from such a small number of SIVcpz samples. Because so few samples exist -- all drawn from chimps in captivity--researchers do not know how prevalent the virus is among wild chimps, or how the virus is transmitted. Doubts are likely to persist until the course of the virus is studied in chimps in the wild. Some health experts said the finding could have far-reaching implications for combating AIDS. Because SIVcpz does not cause the chimps to become ill, researchers believe that the animals’ disease-fighting immune systems may have developed a defense against the virus. Since chimps are 98 percent genetically similar to humans, learning more about the chimps’ immune systems could shed light on new ways to prevent and treat AIDS in humans. Discovering how the chimp’s immune system controls the virus, for example, could help researchers develop a vaccine that generates a similar immune- system response in humans. Other experts noted that even if the finding does not help in the fight against AIDS, it provides strong evidence that dangerous viruses can be transmitted to humans from wild animals. In some cases, the viruses may be harmless to the host animals, but cause sickness and death when transmitted to humans. As people increasingly venture into remote animal habitats, some scientists believe there is a growing risk of new human exposures to previously unknown disease-causing microbes. In the meantime, widespread slaughter of the chimps could make further study of P.t. troglodytes difficult. The wild chimp population, which exceeded 1 million animals in the early 20th century, is now believed to number fewer than 100,000. "We cannot afford to lose these animals, either from the animal’s conservation point of view or a medical investigation standpoint," said Hahn. "It is quite possible that the chimpanzee, which has served as the source of HIV-1, also holds the clues to its successful control.\ The biggest worry that the researchers now have is
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